I soon found that she was also passionate about the state of the world - when I asked her what she thought the future held for the new Europe, she openly condemned the British for pursuing what she saw as an openly anti-Communist policy so soon after the Soviet Union had, as she saw it, almost single- handedly defeated the Nazis. ‘It’s not you, Paul,’ she would smile, ‘but your government is really doing some despicable things. I thought we were allies.’

I tried to steer us away from such topics at first, but she was clever and eloquent - and I was happy just to be able to talk to her. We wrangled good-naturedly, with her usually taking the line that Marxism was the only way ahead and me desperately trying to remember all the reasons I’d been taught that that was wrong. But I couldn’t catch her out: her answers were always lucid and thought-provoking. She was very good at sticking to abstract concepts. Whenever I brought up problems, such as the Moscow show trials and executions, she would fix me with her calmest gaze, concede that humans had misunderstood and abused the ideology, then solemnly insist that the world would only be bettered when class and states had been completely abolished and the dictatorship of the proletariat had taken their place. She used the language of Communist ideology with such a straightforward faith in Peace and Brotherhood that most of the time I acquiesced, simply not to appear a cynical beast and thereby lose her friendship. But when I felt particularly bloody-minded and pursued her on such points, her apparent innocence and naivety vanished and she would counter-attack, questioning British policy in India, for example, or picking out some other apposite situation to prove her point. I realized with growing surprise and admiration that her view of the world had rather more consistency and logic to it than my own, and over time had to concede that, in many areas, I was far more naive and ill-informed than she.

But politics was only one subject of our many conversations that autumn. Anna taught me about Russia, but also about herself. She was a born storyteller, giving vivid and moving accounts of her upbringing and her experiences in the war: she had been with the Red Cross all the way through it, which was why she was now working in the British Zone, rather than the Soviet one. Our friendship soon developed into one of those intimate affairs where you stay up all night talking; we ranged over every subject imaginable, skipping from one to the other like pebbles skimming across a lake. She would often visit me for an hour or so between her shifts on the wards, and it was on one of these occasions that I first kissed her.